Information technology (IT) organizations and service providers, such as providers of cloud-based services, face increasingly large numbers of hardware devices as storage prices decrease and Big Data becomes common. These hardware devices and their subcomponents can number in the thousands. While it is relatively simple to discover and store information related to a single device, it is difficult to know what other devices have similar or identical configurations. Increased scale and a high rate of change experienced by an environment results in frequent part removal or replacement. Together, these elements render manual classification ineffective.